Fanon Fodder (1/?)
So, this weekend has mostly involved cleaning, rewatching the first season of Alias, drinking in the presence of my gi-normous extended family, and attending my cousin Leah's wedding. I'll spare you the details, suffice to say that you know a good wedding when you nearly kill the groom while dancing to Hava Nagila (I really probably didn't spell that right), and your great aunt the nun boogied down to "Louie, Louie". And you had your shoes stolen by the three year old son of your other cousin. And the bride's older brother sang a love song in Japanese. And the kid's table, where you were seated, included a 30 year old woman.
My family goes a long way into explaining the crazy person that I am today.
Other thing to note before hitting up the fic:
They didn't have an "I pimped myself out for science" button.
Inspirations for this fic (and for this chapter) may be attributed in part to liz_marcs's essay Stalking the Fannon Xander and spikendru's Felt or Fur? mpreg adventure. It's not Spander, but the term "vampuppet" had me laughing enough to get me writing sillyfic again.
Continued from Part 0
It should be noted that I personally have nothing against Spander. Make that well-written Spander. I just can't imagine canon Xander reacting to it well.
That being said:
Xander leaned forward in the computer chair. His expression was reminiscent of someone watching a horrific car-wreck in action. His mouth was open and dropping lower by the minute. His single eye was as wide as it could get, but the muscles of his eyelids were straining to open it wider. His eyebrows were nearing his hairline. He wanted, very badly, to close the browser window, turn off the computer, and curl up into a little whimpering ball on Mike's beanbag chair until the entire world just faded away.
There was absolutely no way he could possibly be reading what he was reading.
Now, Xander knew from sick, sad people. He was well acquainted with the fact that there were sadistic assholes in the world who liked nothing better than to cause people pain. He knew there were masochists in a more abstract sense; with the exception of Riley before he left, he couldn't come up with anyone he'd known personally who might fit into that category. He knew there were depraved individuals out there in the wide world.
He'd even stripped for one or two of them, in the summer that "nope, didn't happen, still repressing it, thanks". But he was fairly certain that even Caleb on his most evil day could not have come up with the torture that he was currently enduring.
It had started out tamely enough. After a long discussion with his abductors over what he could and could not actually do (yeah, okay, he knew in theory how to hold a gun, and had passing familiarity with a sword, crossbow, or bow and arrow, but let's be honest, he'd just frickin' lost his EYE, okay? He was lucky he hadn't eviscerated Dawn accidentally in that final battle. He and depth perception just didn't get along so well right now), Mike had offered up his computer as a way to pass the time while he and his friends hammered out a battle plan that might get him through this "Masters of the Multiverse" competition in the smallest number of pieces possible. Xander had agreed on the grounds that they run their ideas past him before actually sending him into battle. They obviously, despite of being "the biggest fans of BtVS evah", had no idea who he actually was.
He'd scanned over the rules of entry on the Masters main page, and they confirmed what the geeks had already told him. If he were to forfeit, it would mean turning himself over to another team to use as they saw fit. If he didn't show up for a fight? Well, that was forfeiting, wasn't it? Fights not ending in forfeit were to the "death"--the site did specify that all characters would be returned to their points of origin in the same condition they'd been in when summoned, but Frank had a point: it WOULD hurt. Xander was not a fan of pain. He had to fight. That, in and of itself, was sick and sad enough.
He had then used his limited computer abilities to call up Google, and looked up "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" out of a sort of morbid curiosity. The search had turned up 1,590,000 results, including episode guides, the official webpage, fan pages galore, actor pages, and fanfiction. He was startled to discover that the television series spanned the entire seven years since Buffy had moved to Sunnydale, but had been canceled two years ago. Which meant he was two years in the future. Or something. The fact that Angel had gotten his own spin-off series made him slightly ill, though he was gratified to see that it only lasted five seasons, and ended one year after the original show. His face was on the cover of DVD box sets. Spike, apparently, was not as dead as they all thought. Or maybe he was. He made a mental note to get word to LA whenever he managed to get back and see if he could warn them ahead of time about Wolfram and Hart's plans, then had to scratch the idea due to implications of universal shut down should he attempt changing what had apparently already aired, over here. The entire idea gave him a headache.
He'd checked out some of the transcripts and screenshots, but the former made him feel like a voyeur, even when they were describing events he had personally been witness to, and the latter just made him wince. He knew he'd packed on the pounds in the months prior to the wedding-that-wasn't, but had he really gotten that . . . puffy?
He pulled his dingy, stained flannel shirt away from his chest and peered down. Oh god, he really had.
With some hesitation, he'd turned to the fanfiction. If nothing else, seeing what adventures fans had written for him and his friends might give him insight into where the geeks had gotten their wacko ideas.
And thus he sat, shocked, horrified, and more than a little traumatized.
Fans, he concluded, were the sickest, saddest individuals on the face of the planet.
They killed people off. Sometimes without even so much as a tear being shed. Yeah, so he wasn't everyone's biggest fan, but even Spike and Angel deserved more consideration than some of these "authors" gave them. Maybe not Parker, though. He had to admit to a smirk of satisfaction whenever he saw that "character" get his comeuppance.
The killing wasn't the worst of it though, not by a long shot. The way some of his friends were portrayed . . . yes, Buffy had gone a little off her rocker over the last couple of years, but she was not the heartless, self-obsessed bimbo some of these people painted her as. And Willow had had a tendency to take Buffy's side on occasion, but some stories had her acting like a brain-dead, power- hungry "yes man", rather than the logical, occasionally power-hungry woman she had grown up to be. And Riley . . . Xander had LIKED Riley. He was a cool guy. He was one of Xander's few male friends, in fact. Xander could barely recognize the man in this "Fish-Boy" some of the writers had described.
But, still, there was worse.
He'd decided to hit up some of the NC-17, sorry, "18" fanfic he stumbled across, against his better judgement, in hopes of finding some good, honest, sweet lovin'. And there was some of that to be had, but . . . .
Him, with Faith. Him, with Willow. Him, with Buffy. Him with all three AT THE SAME TIME. ALL THE TIME. He thought Anya had been an adventurous lover, but they had never even come close to the pure energy and kinkiness that was brought into these stories. It was astounding. God, fan-him was some kind of slut.
Okay, honesty time again? He'd had to adjourn to the bathroom a few times in the course of skimming through those fics. They were undeniably hot, and he was, after all, a male of the species. While BDSM was not really his cup of tea, he couldn't help but get a little chub over some of the more erotic scenes. Frank had had a particularly knowing gleam in his eye when he'd returned after bathroom break number three that he didn't want to examine too closely. He could just picture the large man leaning over the keyboard, breathing hard, and whispering
"Best. Fanfic. Ever."
The only thing that could make Frank worse, he decided, was if he worked at a comic book shop. Simpsons characters were best left in the television, and not embodied in people he actually had to talk to.
Then he'd stumbled upon what really made him ill. Not that he'd realized it at first, of course.
"Hey guys? What does ‘slash' mean?"
They snickered in response.
So he'd opened the link.
Curiosity, he'd decided, did not only kill cats.
Spander.
One little, made-up word. A word that sounded like it should be the name of a part of the warp core on Star Trek. One, little, seven letter word.
Xander's brain had broken.
He could not tear his eyes away from the screen. It was that horrible. It was graphic. It just kept going. There were pages upon pages of fanfic devoted to it. And he could not look away.
He had nothing against gay men. Really, he didn't. He wasn't homophobic or anything, he just wasn't gay himself. And his ridiculously awful joke after his last date notwithstanding, he'd never had the desire to be gay.
Online Xander, he discovered, could be gay. Not just gay, but a flaming, over the top homosexual to rival Jack from Will and Grace.
And attracted to Spike.
Or Angel. Or Riley. Or GILES. Even, on one particularly strange website he encountered, ANDREW. But mostly Spike.
He closed his eye. He took a deep breath. He opened his eye again.
IT WAS STILL THERE.
"Dude, Xander,"
"Wha?"
"You still got any of those Gatekeepery powers lurking in your system?"
The spell broken, Xander shoved himself back from the computer. He hurriedly closed down the browser and hit the power button on the monitor.
If he pretended it didn't exist, would it go away?
"Whatkeeper?"
"Dude," The sound of Mike's hand hitting the back of Steve's head, a particularly distinctive, slightly hollow thud which Xander had heard over and over throughout the evening, echoed through the basement. "That was the BOOKS. We have TV Xander."
"Oh. Right." Steve's voice tightened, as he spoke from the very top of his lungs to keep the pot smoke in as long as possible. "Why didn't we get that Xander?"
"Hey!" Xander spun around in his chair. "There will be none of that. There will be no ‘regretting' that you chose me. You did, and I'm here, and I'm not wanting to die horribly at the hands of--claws of-- whatever of Godzilla, so you will focus on the ‘how can we get Xander to the point that he can survive being stepped on?' and not ‘why did we chose Xander again?'"
Steve looked properly abashed. Of course, he was also staring down into the bowl of his pipe, so that expression might have had more to do with finishing off his stash than hurting the feelings of what he considered to be an imaginary character.
"Hey," Frank stared at Xander, the light of the monitor reflecting eerily off of his glasses in the dim light of the basement. "You weren't even our first choice, moron."
"Oh?" Xander decided he would not be offended by what a class-A jerk like Frank thought of him. Mike had a pop-up blocker installed on his computer, for chrissake. Frank had had no reason to sift through the porn ads while using the thing. "And who was?"
The response came from all three at once, accompanied by looks of glee. "Faith!"
Xander nodded. "Of course. I should have guessed. And why, may I ask, am I here, then, and not Faith the Wonder Slayer?"
Mike shrugged. "She was disqualified."
"Disqualified."
"Yep." Mike leaned back against the wall, folding his hands behind his head. "Seems that twenty- seven different teams all tried to summon her at the same time. The moderators of the Masters challenge had to disqualify her to keep her from being ripped apart and eradicated by the energies."
Xander squeezed his eye shut and swallowed the bile rising in his throat. He was not Faith's biggest fan, but the thought that she could have been destroyed like that, for what these psychos considered to be a game . . . .
He'd died. He was dead, like Anya, in the pit that was once Sunnydale, and he was in hell. That was the only explanation. "Is she okay?"
"Pfft." Frank waved the question off like a particularly annoying gnat. "She's just a character."
Xander didn't quite know how it happened. One minute he was sitting in his chair, staring at the geeks. The next, he was crouched over Frank's bulging stomach, his hands wrapped around the man's bloated throat. He lifted him slightly off the ground and then slammed his head back to the floor. That felt pretty good, so he did it again.
"She" *thunk* "is not" *thunk* "a CHARACTER!"
He expected, somewhere in the part of his brain not busily being royally pissed off at the fat man beneath him, for Steve and Mike to come to their friend's rescue. Instead they just beamed at him.
"See!" Steve bounced up and down. "See! You see! You can fight! I knew it!"
"Well," Mike tilted his head. "Frank's not much of an enemy."
Frank said nothing. He probably couldn't have, if he wanted to. Instead he just stared up into Xander's eye, a small smirk on his face. Xander threw himself to his feet, wiping his now sweat- covered hands on his grimy jeans.
"Whatever." He threw his hands up. "It's probably for the best. Faith would have kicked your asses into next Tuesday by now."
The computer behind him chirped out an electronic riff. He turned away from his abductors and ran a hand down his face, trying to calm himself down. He shouldn't have reacted like that. Beating up on Frank was a distinctly Tony thing to do. He shuddered and turned the monitor back on.
A friendly little message box operated as a censor bar across the scantily-clad-Willow.
"Congratulations! The Masters of the Multiverse competition has begun! Your champion, Alexander Lavelle Harris, is scheduled for his first battle in twenty minutes!" Xander swallowed, and clicked "okay". There was no cancel button in sight. A new message box popped up. "Battle number one: Alexander Lavelle Harris vs. Count Duckula!" A counter ticked off the remaining minutes and seconds.
Mike leaned over his shoulder. "Well, that should be an easy one, at least."
Steve appeared at his other shoulder. Frank still lay on the floor. "Oooohhhhhh, twenty minutes! That's going to be at the same time as the pre-qualifiers!"
Xander knew he shouldn't ask. He knew he didn't want to know anything else about this bizarre competition he'd been entered into. Yet the words came out of his mouth. "What pre-qualifiers?"
"The Bat-Off!" Steve giggled. "All the versions of Batman entered into the competition are going to square off in a giant brawl to see who is the ultimate Bat! The winner goes on to the actual competition."
Xander blinked. To be honest, he rather wanted to see that himself. "Okay, you guys get me my gear, and then you can go watch the ‘Bat-Off'."
Mike and Steve exchanged a worried glance. "Right. Gear. About that."
Xander sighed. "We covered this. You know what weapons I can kinda use. You said you'd get them for me while I surfed the ‘net. So give ‘em."
"We, uh, don't have any yet."
Xander rubbed at the bridge of his nose. He wondered briefly if he should invest in glasses, just so he could clean them. He was beginning to see the value of such a gesture. "You don't have any yet."
"Um, no. I can probably whip you up something real quick, but it'll be kinda . . . rudimentary."
"You do that." Xander turned to Steve. "You tell me why, when you had the last seven hours to put together an arsenal, you're telling me that you DIDN'T."
Steve swallowed, glancing back at Frank, who was contemplating the ceiling with an idle curiosity. "We got distracted. We kept PLANNING to build the arsenal, really."
"Got distracted by what?"
"A . . . philosophical debate."
Xander glared at the stoner.
"It's a really tough question!"
Mike appeared back at his side. The counter read fifteen minutes and forty-three seconds. "Here." He shoved something into Xander's hand.
Xander rolled his eye. "This is a stick."
"If you think you can draw an automatic pistol in fifteen minutes, down to the precise specs and with all the pertinent details, be my guest."
Xander pondered the stick. It had a lot of weight to it, with a club like end, and a sharpened point. "At least I'm going up against a vampire first. Er. Duckpire."
"Vampduck." Steve offered.
Xander raised his stick.
"It really was a tough question!"
"Go on?"
"Well," Steve shrugged. "Who would win in a fight? Superman or Dark Phoenix?"
Xander tightened his hand on his stick. "That's . . ." He lowered the stick slowly, as his geek-brain kicked into gear. He blinked. "Okay, that really IS tough question."
On the monitor, the clock continued to tick.
<--{1}-->
I'll be back to writing Mercy Seat tomorrow, I think, so expect an update around Wednesday-ish.
My family goes a long way into explaining the crazy person that I am today.
Other thing to note before hitting up the fic:
They didn't have an "I pimped myself out for science" button.
Inspirations for this fic (and for this chapter) may be attributed in part to liz_marcs's essay Stalking the Fannon Xander and spikendru's Felt or Fur? mpreg adventure. It's not Spander, but the term "vampuppet" had me laughing enough to get me writing sillyfic again.
Continued from Part 0
It should be noted that I personally have nothing against Spander. Make that well-written Spander. I just can't imagine canon Xander reacting to it well.
That being said:
Xander leaned forward in the computer chair. His expression was reminiscent of someone watching a horrific car-wreck in action. His mouth was open and dropping lower by the minute. His single eye was as wide as it could get, but the muscles of his eyelids were straining to open it wider. His eyebrows were nearing his hairline. He wanted, very badly, to close the browser window, turn off the computer, and curl up into a little whimpering ball on Mike's beanbag chair until the entire world just faded away.
There was absolutely no way he could possibly be reading what he was reading.
Now, Xander knew from sick, sad people. He was well acquainted with the fact that there were sadistic assholes in the world who liked nothing better than to cause people pain. He knew there were masochists in a more abstract sense; with the exception of Riley before he left, he couldn't come up with anyone he'd known personally who might fit into that category. He knew there were depraved individuals out there in the wide world.
He'd even stripped for one or two of them, in the summer that "nope, didn't happen, still repressing it, thanks". But he was fairly certain that even Caleb on his most evil day could not have come up with the torture that he was currently enduring.
It had started out tamely enough. After a long discussion with his abductors over what he could and could not actually do (yeah, okay, he knew in theory how to hold a gun, and had passing familiarity with a sword, crossbow, or bow and arrow, but let's be honest, he'd just frickin' lost his EYE, okay? He was lucky he hadn't eviscerated Dawn accidentally in that final battle. He and depth perception just didn't get along so well right now), Mike had offered up his computer as a way to pass the time while he and his friends hammered out a battle plan that might get him through this "Masters of the Multiverse" competition in the smallest number of pieces possible. Xander had agreed on the grounds that they run their ideas past him before actually sending him into battle. They obviously, despite of being "the biggest fans of BtVS evah", had no idea who he actually was.
He'd scanned over the rules of entry on the Masters main page, and they confirmed what the geeks had already told him. If he were to forfeit, it would mean turning himself over to another team to use as they saw fit. If he didn't show up for a fight? Well, that was forfeiting, wasn't it? Fights not ending in forfeit were to the "death"--the site did specify that all characters would be returned to their points of origin in the same condition they'd been in when summoned, but Frank had a point: it WOULD hurt. Xander was not a fan of pain. He had to fight. That, in and of itself, was sick and sad enough.
He had then used his limited computer abilities to call up Google, and looked up "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" out of a sort of morbid curiosity. The search had turned up 1,590,000 results, including episode guides, the official webpage, fan pages galore, actor pages, and fanfiction. He was startled to discover that the television series spanned the entire seven years since Buffy had moved to Sunnydale, but had been canceled two years ago. Which meant he was two years in the future. Or something. The fact that Angel had gotten his own spin-off series made him slightly ill, though he was gratified to see that it only lasted five seasons, and ended one year after the original show. His face was on the cover of DVD box sets. Spike, apparently, was not as dead as they all thought. Or maybe he was. He made a mental note to get word to LA whenever he managed to get back and see if he could warn them ahead of time about Wolfram and Hart's plans, then had to scratch the idea due to implications of universal shut down should he attempt changing what had apparently already aired, over here. The entire idea gave him a headache.
He'd checked out some of the transcripts and screenshots, but the former made him feel like a voyeur, even when they were describing events he had personally been witness to, and the latter just made him wince. He knew he'd packed on the pounds in the months prior to the wedding-that-wasn't, but had he really gotten that . . . puffy?
He pulled his dingy, stained flannel shirt away from his chest and peered down. Oh god, he really had.
With some hesitation, he'd turned to the fanfiction. If nothing else, seeing what adventures fans had written for him and his friends might give him insight into where the geeks had gotten their wacko ideas.
And thus he sat, shocked, horrified, and more than a little traumatized.
Fans, he concluded, were the sickest, saddest individuals on the face of the planet.
They killed people off. Sometimes without even so much as a tear being shed. Yeah, so he wasn't everyone's biggest fan, but even Spike and Angel deserved more consideration than some of these "authors" gave them. Maybe not Parker, though. He had to admit to a smirk of satisfaction whenever he saw that "character" get his comeuppance.
The killing wasn't the worst of it though, not by a long shot. The way some of his friends were portrayed . . . yes, Buffy had gone a little off her rocker over the last couple of years, but she was not the heartless, self-obsessed bimbo some of these people painted her as. And Willow had had a tendency to take Buffy's side on occasion, but some stories had her acting like a brain-dead, power- hungry "yes man", rather than the logical, occasionally power-hungry woman she had grown up to be. And Riley . . . Xander had LIKED Riley. He was a cool guy. He was one of Xander's few male friends, in fact. Xander could barely recognize the man in this "Fish-Boy" some of the writers had described.
But, still, there was worse.
He'd decided to hit up some of the NC-17, sorry, "18" fanfic he stumbled across, against his better judgement, in hopes of finding some good, honest, sweet lovin'. And there was some of that to be had, but . . . .
Him, with Faith. Him, with Willow. Him, with Buffy. Him with all three AT THE SAME TIME. ALL THE TIME. He thought Anya had been an adventurous lover, but they had never even come close to the pure energy and kinkiness that was brought into these stories. It was astounding. God, fan-him was some kind of slut.
Okay, honesty time again? He'd had to adjourn to the bathroom a few times in the course of skimming through those fics. They were undeniably hot, and he was, after all, a male of the species. While BDSM was not really his cup of tea, he couldn't help but get a little chub over some of the more erotic scenes. Frank had had a particularly knowing gleam in his eye when he'd returned after bathroom break number three that he didn't want to examine too closely. He could just picture the large man leaning over the keyboard, breathing hard, and whispering
"Best. Fanfic. Ever."
The only thing that could make Frank worse, he decided, was if he worked at a comic book shop. Simpsons characters were best left in the television, and not embodied in people he actually had to talk to.
Then he'd stumbled upon what really made him ill. Not that he'd realized it at first, of course.
"Hey guys? What does ‘slash' mean?"
They snickered in response.
So he'd opened the link.
Curiosity, he'd decided, did not only kill cats.
Spander.
One little, made-up word. A word that sounded like it should be the name of a part of the warp core on Star Trek. One, little, seven letter word.
Xander's brain had broken.
He could not tear his eyes away from the screen. It was that horrible. It was graphic. It just kept going. There were pages upon pages of fanfic devoted to it. And he could not look away.
He had nothing against gay men. Really, he didn't. He wasn't homophobic or anything, he just wasn't gay himself. And his ridiculously awful joke after his last date notwithstanding, he'd never had the desire to be gay.
Online Xander, he discovered, could be gay. Not just gay, but a flaming, over the top homosexual to rival Jack from Will and Grace.
And attracted to Spike.
Or Angel. Or Riley. Or GILES. Even, on one particularly strange website he encountered, ANDREW. But mostly Spike.
He closed his eye. He took a deep breath. He opened his eye again.
IT WAS STILL THERE.
"Dude, Xander,"
"Wha?"
"You still got any of those Gatekeepery powers lurking in your system?"
The spell broken, Xander shoved himself back from the computer. He hurriedly closed down the browser and hit the power button on the monitor.
If he pretended it didn't exist, would it go away?
"Whatkeeper?"
"Dude," The sound of Mike's hand hitting the back of Steve's head, a particularly distinctive, slightly hollow thud which Xander had heard over and over throughout the evening, echoed through the basement. "That was the BOOKS. We have TV Xander."
"Oh. Right." Steve's voice tightened, as he spoke from the very top of his lungs to keep the pot smoke in as long as possible. "Why didn't we get that Xander?"
"Hey!" Xander spun around in his chair. "There will be none of that. There will be no ‘regretting' that you chose me. You did, and I'm here, and I'm not wanting to die horribly at the hands of--claws of-- whatever of Godzilla, so you will focus on the ‘how can we get Xander to the point that he can survive being stepped on?' and not ‘why did we chose Xander again?'"
Steve looked properly abashed. Of course, he was also staring down into the bowl of his pipe, so that expression might have had more to do with finishing off his stash than hurting the feelings of what he considered to be an imaginary character.
"Hey," Frank stared at Xander, the light of the monitor reflecting eerily off of his glasses in the dim light of the basement. "You weren't even our first choice, moron."
"Oh?" Xander decided he would not be offended by what a class-A jerk like Frank thought of him. Mike had a pop-up blocker installed on his computer, for chrissake. Frank had had no reason to sift through the porn ads while using the thing. "And who was?"
The response came from all three at once, accompanied by looks of glee. "Faith!"
Xander nodded. "Of course. I should have guessed. And why, may I ask, am I here, then, and not Faith the Wonder Slayer?"
Mike shrugged. "She was disqualified."
"Disqualified."
"Yep." Mike leaned back against the wall, folding his hands behind his head. "Seems that twenty- seven different teams all tried to summon her at the same time. The moderators of the Masters challenge had to disqualify her to keep her from being ripped apart and eradicated by the energies."
Xander squeezed his eye shut and swallowed the bile rising in his throat. He was not Faith's biggest fan, but the thought that she could have been destroyed like that, for what these psychos considered to be a game . . . .
He'd died. He was dead, like Anya, in the pit that was once Sunnydale, and he was in hell. That was the only explanation. "Is she okay?"
"Pfft." Frank waved the question off like a particularly annoying gnat. "She's just a character."
Xander didn't quite know how it happened. One minute he was sitting in his chair, staring at the geeks. The next, he was crouched over Frank's bulging stomach, his hands wrapped around the man's bloated throat. He lifted him slightly off the ground and then slammed his head back to the floor. That felt pretty good, so he did it again.
"She" *thunk* "is not" *thunk* "a CHARACTER!"
He expected, somewhere in the part of his brain not busily being royally pissed off at the fat man beneath him, for Steve and Mike to come to their friend's rescue. Instead they just beamed at him.
"See!" Steve bounced up and down. "See! You see! You can fight! I knew it!"
"Well," Mike tilted his head. "Frank's not much of an enemy."
Frank said nothing. He probably couldn't have, if he wanted to. Instead he just stared up into Xander's eye, a small smirk on his face. Xander threw himself to his feet, wiping his now sweat- covered hands on his grimy jeans.
"Whatever." He threw his hands up. "It's probably for the best. Faith would have kicked your asses into next Tuesday by now."
The computer behind him chirped out an electronic riff. He turned away from his abductors and ran a hand down his face, trying to calm himself down. He shouldn't have reacted like that. Beating up on Frank was a distinctly Tony thing to do. He shuddered and turned the monitor back on.
A friendly little message box operated as a censor bar across the scantily-clad-Willow.
"Congratulations! The Masters of the Multiverse competition has begun! Your champion, Alexander Lavelle Harris, is scheduled for his first battle in twenty minutes!" Xander swallowed, and clicked "okay". There was no cancel button in sight. A new message box popped up. "Battle number one: Alexander Lavelle Harris vs. Count Duckula!" A counter ticked off the remaining minutes and seconds.
Mike leaned over his shoulder. "Well, that should be an easy one, at least."
Steve appeared at his other shoulder. Frank still lay on the floor. "Oooohhhhhh, twenty minutes! That's going to be at the same time as the pre-qualifiers!"
Xander knew he shouldn't ask. He knew he didn't want to know anything else about this bizarre competition he'd been entered into. Yet the words came out of his mouth. "What pre-qualifiers?"
"The Bat-Off!" Steve giggled. "All the versions of Batman entered into the competition are going to square off in a giant brawl to see who is the ultimate Bat! The winner goes on to the actual competition."
Xander blinked. To be honest, he rather wanted to see that himself. "Okay, you guys get me my gear, and then you can go watch the ‘Bat-Off'."
Mike and Steve exchanged a worried glance. "Right. Gear. About that."
Xander sighed. "We covered this. You know what weapons I can kinda use. You said you'd get them for me while I surfed the ‘net. So give ‘em."
"We, uh, don't have any yet."
Xander rubbed at the bridge of his nose. He wondered briefly if he should invest in glasses, just so he could clean them. He was beginning to see the value of such a gesture. "You don't have any yet."
"Um, no. I can probably whip you up something real quick, but it'll be kinda . . . rudimentary."
"You do that." Xander turned to Steve. "You tell me why, when you had the last seven hours to put together an arsenal, you're telling me that you DIDN'T."
Steve swallowed, glancing back at Frank, who was contemplating the ceiling with an idle curiosity. "We got distracted. We kept PLANNING to build the arsenal, really."
"Got distracted by what?"
"A . . . philosophical debate."
Xander glared at the stoner.
"It's a really tough question!"
Mike appeared back at his side. The counter read fifteen minutes and forty-three seconds. "Here." He shoved something into Xander's hand.
Xander rolled his eye. "This is a stick."
"If you think you can draw an automatic pistol in fifteen minutes, down to the precise specs and with all the pertinent details, be my guest."
Xander pondered the stick. It had a lot of weight to it, with a club like end, and a sharpened point. "At least I'm going up against a vampire first. Er. Duckpire."
"Vampduck." Steve offered.
Xander raised his stick.
"It really was a tough question!"
"Go on?"
"Well," Steve shrugged. "Who would win in a fight? Superman or Dark Phoenix?"
Xander tightened his hand on his stick. "That's . . ." He lowered the stick slowly, as his geek-brain kicked into gear. He blinked. "Okay, that really IS tough question."
On the monitor, the clock continued to tick.
<--{1}-->
I'll be back to writing Mercy Seat tomorrow, I think, so expect an update around Wednesday-ish.